Clarisse

Description

Clarisse is a new breed of high-end 2D/3D animation software which is the fusion of an animation package, a compositing software and a 3D rendering engine.

Clarisse has been designed to streamline the workflow of CG artists to let them work and constantly interact on their final image with full effects on. Clarisse, is specialized in the creation of and assembly of immense environments, look development, lighting and rendering.

Clarisse 3.5 New Features

NEW PARTICLE AND PROPERTY PAINT

Thanks to Clarisse 3.5, it has never been so easy to control instances in your scatterers!

Directly paint particles in Clarisse to layout geometry instances and drive each of their attributes such as ID, rotation or scale etc. by painting custom particle properties. Use the new Bake Scatterer feature to bake any of your procedurally generated scatterers to edit and control manually individual instances by using brush strokes.

NEW PER-OBJECT SCATTER PROBABILITY

In Clarisse 3.5, you can now set the probability of each scattered object to creatively control how often specific objects are instanced by your scatterer. This way you can easily manage the diversity of your instance distribution by favoring some objects over others to have for example 20% of trees for 80% of bushes.

NEW SCATTERER INSTANCE COLLISION DETECTION

Clarisse 3.5 introduces an all-new fast and flexible instance collision detection for scatterers to greatly improve the realism of your scenes. Overlapping instances in your scatterers can now be automatically culled to create more natural distribution. Collision detection can also be creatively controlled by providing alternate sets of bounding box proxies overriding the ones coming from the geometries.

NEW PER-INSTANCE TIME OFFSET IN SCATTERERS

Clarisse 3.5 allows you to control, vary and offset the input time of each instance in a scatterer. You can now build complex animations out of a few animated items to allow you to very easily animate massive crowds, simulate blast of winds in forests or create chain-reaction explosions.

IMPROVED GROUPS

Groups are a central piece of Clarisse’s workflow. They describe collections of items and their contents can be manually or automatically set via procedural rules. The new 3.5 group engine offers greater flexibility by allowing you to mix both rules and explicit item referencing. It offers faster performances by letting you bake the content of your groups in place. Automatic shot assembly has also been improved in 3.5: you can now use groups to procedurally build your Shading Layers and automatically assign AOV Stores and Light Path Expressions to your renders.

FILE REFERENCING IMPROVEMENTS

Clarisse 3.5 brings you a new faster referencing engine built from ground up. Thanks to this new engine you can now directly create or clear overrides at attribute, object or context level. You will also experience large performance improvements as overrides are now cleared without reloading original references from disk.

NEW LIGHT PATH EXPRESSIONS (LPEs)

The new powerful Light Path Expression, based on Open Shading Language (OSL) standard syntax, gives you fine controls to output custom AOVs describing specific parts of the light simulation for compositing purposes. For example, you can output all contributions of the Sun in your scene or decide to only extract the total reflection resulting from a group of lights of a specific object in your scene.

Using LPEs you can also easily output single AOVs for each present light in your scene, offering you the flexibility to adjust your lighting after rendering in a compositing package.

Speed up your renders thanks to the new Low Light Threshold in 3.5. Low Light Threshold allows you to let the renderer skip computation on lights that are often almost invisible in your final render.When faint lights have their level of contribution under this user threshold, they are automatically skipped from the lighting computation resulting in improved performances with almost no visual loss.

NEW LIGHT FALLOFF CONTROLS

When it comes to simulate photo-realistic illumination it’s great to rely on physical lights.However, sometimes you want to go further to artistically control your lights. Thanks to the new physical light falloff controls, you can now cheat with light’s physics model by manually overriding light intensity over the distance to reach the exact look you want.

NEW OPENSUBDIV SUPPORT

Pixar’s OpenSubdiv tessellation engine is now fully supported in Clarisse 3.5. Clarisse supports normals / UV / geometry property (primVar) interpolation as well as semi-sharp creases. Using this new engine you’re sure to get the exact same geometry in Clarisse that you get in your 3D modeling or DCC application supporting OpenSubdiv.

IMPROVED RAY-TRACING PRECISION

Creating complex and large scale environments may introduce undesirable noisy artefacts due to numerical imprecisions. Formerly, the only solution to remove this noise was to manually tweak the raytrace offset value on each individual object. Thanks to numerous improvements in Clarisse’s 3.5 engine, numerical imprecisions artefacts are now automatically removed from your renders in almost all cases!

New Standard PBR Material

Clarisse 3.5 introduces a new Standard PBR material largely inspired from the very popular AlSurface. Thanks to the new Standard, you don’t need to construct complex network of nodes anymore to create realistic materials. You directly describe most of real world materials such as skin, plastic, metal, water or car paint in a single node. Even better, since the Standard PBR material virtually allows a ‘1:1’ reuse of parameters value and existing texture maps created for the AlSurface, it’s now possible to convert existing libraries of materials made for Arnold or VRay to Clarisse!

New Builtin Triplanar Node

Clarisse 3.5 introduces a new Triplanar texture node to help texturing geometries without the need of relying on UVs. The Triplanar allows you to specify different textures for each 6 axis. Combined with the latest Object Space feature letting you project on either based or deformed geometry, Triplanar becomes the node of choice to lookdev complex models such as landscapes.

New Per-geometry reference frame

In Clarisse 3.5, you now set a custom reference frame on animated geometries to specify the base geometry used for texture projections and geometry sampling.This is extremely useful when doing camera maps as well as point cloud generation.

Enhanced user interface

Clarisse 3.5 user interface has been greatly enhanced with the main target of improving both user experience and workflow. This major refresh is more modern and includes new sets of icons, searchable menus, dockable/undockable widgets, new interface designs improving both readability and usability and various speed improvements throughout the application.

Clarisse 3.0 New Features

Rendering

All new physically based rendering engine

New physical lights, materials and volumes

New layered and composite materials

New multi-sample deformation and transformation motion blur

Rendering speed optimizations such as up to twice as fast to render volumes

Clarisse supports most Industry standard file formats and runs on all 3 platforms: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Animations and geometries can be imported in Alembic, LWS/LWO/MDD or Wavefront OBJ files and Clarisse can read every image file format commonly used. If needed, Clarisse can also output assembled geometries to add details in external modeling packages.

ADVANCED SET DRESSING TOOLS

Clarisse provides a set of unique tools that speedup greatly set dressing. Unlike any other application, artists work interactively with billions of polygons without the need of using proxy items. Artists can apply constrained random transformations and interactively position items on any surfaces, whatever the scene complexity. Using combiners, they can create 3D geometry tiles to use them as a 3D paint brush or as input for scatterers to generate massive forests or even cities procedurally.

ADVANCED CAMERA PROJECTION

Digimatte artists using Clarisse enter a new era where they work their art while interactively visualizing their camera projections on scenes made of billions of polygons. Matte paintings relying on multiple cameras are also greatly simplified thanks to the camera occlusion mode. Each projection can also have its list of geometries that will be used as camera occluders. It becomes possible to render 3D objects interacting with 3D environments textured using camera projections in a single pass.

NON-LINEAR USER WORKFLOW

The same way a render is automatically re-rendered when they modify a material, a forest scattered on a geometry is automatically updated when the underlying geometry changes.Clarisse's workflow is non-linear and lets artists work non sequentially. They can then modify or change any properties without manually tweaking items that should be updated.

ASSET UPDATE AND SYNCHRONIZATION

Clarisse provides a dedicated interface to manage external assets on which the project relies on. When external assets are modified, artists can synchronize in a click their project with latest changes. They can also identify what will be affected by a modification and control what to update by individually synchronizing assets.

INTEGRATED LAYERED BASED COMPOSITING

With Clarisse, artists work while seeing their image getting interactively updated with compositing on. They can mix layers of several kind ranging from a simple still image or an image sequence to a fully rendered animated 3d scene. Each layer provides an independent stack of filters that can be used to add effects, such as a Gaussian blur, or to adjust color and contrast.

DEEP IMAGE OUTPUT

In a traditional image a single value (typically a color) is stored per pixel. Compositing is then performed using masks and it can be difficult to compose two different images originating from different rendering engines for example. To solve this issue, Clarisse outputs deep images in which a list of values along with their depth information is stored per pixel.

Compositing deep images becomes a simple matter of merging images without requiring any special mask or producing any artefact. It becomes a lot easier to integrate the insanely detailed environment rendered in Clarisse with a render coming from another engine.

CLARISSE FILE REFERENCING SYSTEM

Clarisse provides a powerful file referencing system resolving a lot of the issues that occur when working in teams. When referenced files are modified, projects are automatically updated to latest versions. User modifications on referenced items are performed via attribute overrides and updates are blazing fast: when reloading a reference, Clarisse only updates and reloads what has actually changed.

UPDATES MADE SMART

In a single click, Clarisse looks for external modifications to update project items to latest versions when available. In the previous example, a lead lighter published a new version of the lightset. When the lighter working on this shot resynched for updates, only its referenced lightset project got updated. Geometries or textures were not reloaded as they didn't change. This is how and why, this update was applied in a fraction of a second.

Material Assignments made easy

Alembic is not meant to describe materials, that's why files exported from animation packages do not include any material information. To resolve this issue, Clarisse offers a great feature to streamline material assignment with geometries. Shading Layers and materials can be stored in a separate project file to be referenced later on in shots.

Compositing made part of the same workflow

Unlike in other applications, compositing is integrated to the lighting and rendering workflow of Clarisse. Instead of working blindly on passes or layers, Artists work directly and interactively their renders will the full compositing on. There's no need to save layers as in-between images. There's no need for the artist to switch back and forth between the rendering and compositing application. Artists directly and interactively work on their final images. They can mix layers of several kinds ranging from a simple still image or an image sequence to a fully rendered animated 3d scene. Each layer provides an independent stack of filters that can be used to add effects such as a Gaussian blur or to adjust color and contrast.

Rendering Made Simple

Clarisse comes with a built-in high-end renderer and a set of materials allowing for non photorealistic to photorealistic rendering. Clarisse renderer is Monte Carlo based: there's no need for pre-process, pre-pass, shadow/reflection map, baked point cloud or any magic-driven-time-consuming feature. Image quality is defined by the number of samples and artists may control global sampling quality by changing a single parameter. It's that simple.

Memory Optimizations made automatic

Clarisse unique memory manager automatically tracks memory to detect if similar data is already there. When detected, data is automatically shared to avoid redundancy. This simple rule applies to geometries, to deformations, to tessellations and to virtually anything. This saves a massive amount of Artists time making a huge difference between a "shot that can" from a "shot that can't" render. The infamous frustrating-time-consuming-manual-memory-optimization step required by traditionnal software is, using Clarisse, a thing of the past.

Full Color Management

Clarisse supports custom 2D or 3D LUTs that can be arranged in a user library. Artists can then switch between LUTs in the application to apply color correction on texture maps or any user interface elements displaying color. Clarisse makes it simple: artists can work in context while seeing their images with the right colors.

Unified Shading Network

In Clarisse, materials are organized in a network of texture nodes where each one outputs a vector that can be seen as a color. That way, there is no type conversion and it is very similar to a node graph that would be made in node-based compositing application.

PRODUCTION READY TEXTURE MAPPING

Clarisse reads all Industry's standard image formats used in production. It is ready for pipelines using The Foundry MARI or Autodesk Mudbox: it supports natively both UDIM and Uv Tiles conventions. Texture maps can be either loaded in memory or streamed from disk during rendering at the cost of a minor performance hit. Mip maps are read from file when available or generated automatically on a need-to basis. Textures can be filtered using several methods ranging from basic nearest neighbor to advanced anisotropic filtering.

Advanced Projections

Along traditionnal UV Mapping, Clarisse supports a wide range of implicit 2D/3D projections and each one supports transformations. These implicit projections are computed during rendering without the need of unfolding UV maps onto the geometry. Clarisse also provides an advanced camera projection supporting geometry occlusion.

SHADING LAYER

As soon as they deal with multiple shots sharing the same assets, traditional material assignation to geometries makes it very difficult and tedious for artists.

To resolve this issue, Clarisse introduces Shading Layers. Shading Layers are sets of text rules paired with shading properties such as material clip map and visibility.

Each rule identifies one or multiple geometries using their names to apply user defined shading properties.

Artists can finally work their look development in isolation as materials become implicitly attached to geometries so they can be easily reapplied in lighting shots.

ADVANCED 3D VIEW

Unlike traditional software, Clarisse's 3D View is powered by its rendering engine. Not only Clarisse can display billions of polys at interactive rates but actual materials can be worked on in real time. While in Previz mode, Clarisse's 3D View lets artists work on the real deal instead of working on an Open GL approximate.

ADVANCED AOVS INTEGRATION

In Clarisse, materials come with their own set of pre-defined AOVs but they can also be extended by any number of custom ones created by artists. Unlike pre-defined ones, custom AOVs directly output the result of texture nodes which aren't necessary part of the beauty pass. They can represent any useful information without interfering with the beauty. AOVs are displayed interactively in the Image View and artists can freely choose which ones they want to output in their renders.

DIRT AND OCCLUSION

Clarisse provides a powerful and fast raytraced occlusion node. This versatile node provides a lot of control to artists. It can be used to create from simple ambient occlusion pass to procedurally generated realistic dirt.

Based on unidirectional path tracer, Clarisse rendering engine solves illumination and shading using monte carlo sampling.There's no need for pre-process, pre-pass, shadow map, reflection map or baked point cloud. There's no limitation using conjointly motion blur and depth of field. Image quality can be controlled with a single parameter to increase or decrease global sampling for a faster feedback. It's predictable and the only artefact you can get is high frequency noise resulting from under sampling. To remove it, just increase the number of samples or apply a denoiser filter in post to save render times. It's that simple.

SMART SAMPLING

Unlike most rendering engines, Clarisse render times don't fly through the roof when antialiasing, depth of field or motion blur are on. Clarisse smartly redistributes samples to avoid multiplying material or light sampling with antialiasing. When antialiasing is enabled or increased, artists can set them freely without the need of lowering individual sampling level.

DISPLACEMENTS

Clarisse features an extensive, fast and memory efficient displacement mapping engine with adaptive tessellation. It features several mode ranging from single sided normal-based displacements up to double sided vector-based displacements.

SUBSURFACE SCATTERING

Sub-surface scattering, or light scattering beneath surfaces, is calculated using a brute force raytraced approach. There's no need to cache point clouds or wait for a pre-preprocess.

PARTICLE RENDERING

Clarisse doesn't directly render particles, instead, it renders geometries. It uses particles (along with animation) as placement to scatter geometries or volumes. Custom particle properties such as age, color, rotation... can be used to drive scattering as well as shading. Particles along with scatterers can be used to create visual effects, clouds, build entire cities or animate crowds.

VOLUME RENDERING

Volumes (including physical atmospheres) are considered like any other geometries in Clarisse. They can be scattered, instanced, combined and they can use any materials along with dedicated physical ones. They are directly rendered in the beauty pass. Shading and illumination are performed on the fly during rendering without pre-process.

Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs)

Clarisse provides an extensive AOV framework that is one of the best available in the market. Each type of material defines its set of AOV that can be exported. AOVs are then rendered in a single pass and stored either in multiple images or embedded in a single EXR or TIFF.

Custom AOVs can also be created to export the result of a sub-graph of nodes or even custom information that is not participating to the shading. It's simple, powerful and elegant.

Super Fast and Interactive

Just think about this. Clarisse CPU-based rendering engine is so fast that it only relies on it when displaying scenes in its 3D View. Not only you work with the real deal, but everything you see is ready to render: there is no more transfer between the 3D DCC application and the renderer.

Deep Output

Clarisse simplifies both rendering and compositing. Output directly Deep EXR from Clarisse to compose your layers without the need of special mask passes or without fighting with blending artefacts. Clarisse also supports user defined deep data merging to reduce the size of your EXR.

Memory Efficient

Clarisse is one of the most memory efficient 3D application available on the market. Data is loaded and evaluated on an as-needed basis. It also features an innovative real-time automatic data de-duplication engine. Memory usage is automatically optimized as identical data such as geometry is transparently shared in the background. Finally, in Clarisse the renderer is the 3D application. Consequently data isn't duplicated between 3D DCC applications and renderers.

Texture Streaming

You can render scenes using virtually hundreds of gigabytes of texture maps. Clarisse rendering engine can stream texture maps from disk during rendering when needed. As a result, textures aren't entirely loaded in memory: only a small fraction is.

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Specifications & Licensing

System Requirements

Clarisse has a modern mutlithreaded architecture and uses all the available system cores. The more cores you have, the faster Clarisse will run!